Category Archives: Text Ads

By its very nature, which is rooted in a bidding system for premium ad placement, PPC is very competitive form of marketing that breeds competition between brands. A PPC strategy that many business owners use is bidding on their competitor’s branded keywords. Bidding on your competitor’s branded keywords can open your business up to customers who you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. On the other hand, a shot across the bow at your competitor may cause your competitor to retaliate and bid on your branded terms – driving up the CPC for both terms. So before you decide to open the can of worms of bidding on your competition’s keywords, consider the pros and cons.

Pros:

• In general, branded keywords are a great way to attract customers who are high in the sales funnel and still weighing their options between brands. These are customers who may not have known about your brand, otherwise.
• Bidding on your competition doesn’t cannibalize your organic search listing. Chances are that you probably rank pretty high in organic search listings for your own branded terms. By bidding on your own branded terms you may be cannibalizing traffic that you would’ve gotten anyway through organic search listing.

Cons:

• Since the landing page has very little relevance with your competitor’s branded terms, you can expect low quality scores when you bid on your competitor’s branded keywords. This means you’ll have to pay a higher CPC when bidding on the competition.
• If your competitors aren’t bidding on your keywords now, then they will shortly as soon as you start to appear for their search terms.
• Using your competitor’s trademarked brand name in your ad text may draw the attention of Google and get your ad disapproved.

How to turn the “Cons” into “Pros”:  Don’t target exact trademarked names, but instead the city and the make that that dealership sells.  Create custom landing pages with keywords targeted not directly at your competing dealerships, but close to it.  This will raise the quality score of the page, lowering your CPC.

Together Integrated PPC and Content Motive can create great landing pages lowing your cost per click and greatly improving your landing page’s quality score.  What does this mean?  You can save money while maximizing your profits!  Click here to get started!